In a paperless era increasingly devoid of carbon copies and other hard copy documents, homes and businesses still use a lot of paper. Though paper is still necessary for signatures or some legal documents, its storage and retrieval require significant space and human resources. Many businesses opt to digitize their paper records for easy administration. You can accomplish this faster by investing in a few key resources.
You need a scanner in order to convert your documents to digital, but flatbed scanners, through versatile, require you to lift a lid and replace or flip over each page of a document. Furthermore, flatbed scanners are limited by the speed of a bulb moving across the glass bed. A better option for using a scanner with multi-page documents is a scanner with an Automatic Document Feeder. Though ADF implementations vary, they have a paper tray from which individual sheets are pulled across a lamp. In this way, they can automatically pull a full stack of papers one-by-one.
Traditional ADF trays are convenient for one-sided documents. Many documents, however, are printed on both sides. In order to accommodate double-sided documents, purchase an ADF scanner with duplexing abilities. A duplexer pulls the document one way and then a series of rollers flips it and pushes it back over the lamp.
In addition to the hardware, quick scanning also comes down to the program that controls it. Though many scanners come with scanning software, these programs are generally inefficient at sorting, processing and naming clusters of documents. Advanced programs, such as Adobe Acrobat, provide additional services to make automation and indexing easier. Acrobat, for example, can perform optical character recognition, or OCR, making the scanned documents easily searchable.
Scanning large documents requires a storage solution. Initially, the scanner stores the document on the hard drive of the computer to which it’s connected. This location, however, prevents file sharing and leaves the digitized document vulnerable to hard drive failure — if the hard drive on which the files are stored dies, then all the documents are lost. Use a cloud-based storage system for archiving the documents quickly and making them accessible to others. A service such as Microsoft’s SkyDrive or Apple’s iCloud quickly makes your scanned documents available on any of your compatible devices. If you need to share the documents between users, you’ll need services such as Google Drive that allow sharing of files with other Google users. Large volumes of documents require scalable solutions, such as Rackspace’s 10-cents-per-GB Cloud Service or Amazon’s $500-per-year, 1 TB storage upgrade to Cloud Drive.
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Writer Bio
Jacob Andrew previously worked as an A+ and CCNA-certified technology specialist. After receiving his BA in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2012, he turned his focus towards writing about travel, politics and current technology.
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What Is Best to Scan a Lot of Documents Quickly? – Chron
